The Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery opens this week with Rob Pruitt’s “Flea Market.” (Photo courtesy of Georgetown University)

Al Miner knows that asking museum aficionados who are used to doing all their gallery-going around Logan Circle or at the Smithsonians to schlepp out to Georgetown University is a big ask—even if the offerings there are pretty cool.

“It’s like being in this funny little tropical island: It’s picturesque and active and there’s cool food and people, but we’re so isolated from Washington,” says Miner, the director and chief curator of Georgetown’s galleries, of the neighborhood. “We really need to pull them in.”

He hopes Georgetown’s Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery, specializing in contemporary art, can be the thing that brings them in. The gallery opens this week with Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, a bit of performance art-meets-shopping trip.

Pruitt, a multimedia artist who’s been staging Flea Markets around the world for nearly 20 years, asked dozens of local artists to set up a booth in the gallery’s new space in an academic building. But the details end there: Pruitt gives his participants no additional information for their time in the space.

For example: “Rob could invite a painter and they could sell used books, or clothes,” Miner says. “An artist might say to person who comes in, ‘I’ll give you one of my prints if you sing me a song.'” He knows of one artist who’s selling shoes at Flea Market.

The event is free to attend, and visitors can haggle or barter if they wish. The only rule is that all proceeds go back to the vendors, who include local artists Linda Hesh, Josephine Haden, and Scip Barnhart, as well as Georgetown student groups.

What I’m most excited about is seeing how people interact with each other,” Miner says. “With students especially … they could be sitting next to a pretty significant artist in D.C. while selling products for their club. That’s a great platform for community building.”

Flea Market is participatory and active, which is just how Miner wants the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery to feel. A former curatorial assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and curator for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he’s eager to revive the feeling he felt visiting D.C.’s smaller galleries years ago.

“I have very fond memories of being in a throng of people hanging out on 14th Street around all those galleries,” Miner, who grew up in Anne Arundel County, Md., says. “I remember loving that buzz and community.”

The 4,000 square foot Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery is located inside Georgetown’s Walsh Building. (Photo courtesy of Georgetown University)

The Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery, named for two married alumni donors who spearheaded efforts to open a contemporary museum at Georgetown, takes over 4,000 square feet of the university’s Walsh Building that has previously held a lecture hall, performance venue, and black box theater. The museum sits across the building’s lobby from the Spagnuolo Art Gallery, which Miner also curates. There’s room inside for performance art pieces, exhibits, lectures, and more, all of which will be free and most of which will be open to the public.

The gallery is in good company among other university-created art spaces: American University has the 130,000 square foot Katzen Museum (disclosure: AU owns DCist’s parent company, WAMU) and George Washington University’s art museum houses the Textile Museum. Catholic University, meanwhile, has a collection of about 1,500 pieces of art and artifacts in storage or scattered around campus.

After Flea Market, the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery will host an exhibit from queer Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson. Don’t Make Me Over will include ten brand new paintings from Gibson on rawhide, as well as an immersive installation draped in rainbow fabric and inscribed with song lyrics.

“Jeff asks interesting questions about what would the modern art world look like if Native Americans had been part of the conversation,” Miner says.

It all sounds awfully—dare we say it—Instagrammable. That’s not Miner’s goal, at least not explicitly.

“You don’t have to make a show to be Instagrammable, you make a show that’s brilliant and beautiful and smart and engaging, and it becomes Instagrammable,” he says. “It happens to be great that these pieces are really visually intriguing. People will want to capture their experiences in these shows.” But at the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery, he says, “ideas do rule the roost.”

The Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery is located at 3535 Prospect St. NW. Flea Market runs August 29-30, 11:30 a.m.-7 p.m., free entry. Register here.